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Everest

November 10, 2011

Rumor on the trail that the Lukla airport had shut down started a week ago. We were still making our push to Everest Base Camp (17,701 feet) and Kala Patthar (18,315 feet). The weather was starting to change, and afternoons brought a thick fog and limited visibility. Temperatures plummeted to minus 5-degrees F at night. Our guide didn’t seem concerned; five days later, it was a different story.

Snuggled into the Himalaya at 9,000 feet in elevation, Lukla is the "major" portal in and out of the Everest region. Its tiny airport is ranked as one of the most dangerous in the world.

If the weather didn’t lift, we would not be able to hike into Lukla as planned. Two thousand trekkers were already stranded there. All the hotel rooms were booked. People were sleeping where they could—on dining room floors, in hallways, and inside their tents. Food was being rationed as supply planes were grounded in Kathmandu. The few airlines and helicopter service that service Lukla, were helpless.

August 24, 2011

Reaching the top of K2 on her fourth attempt, Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, a 40-year-old Austrian alpinist who resides in Germany, has become the first woman to summit all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks without using supplementary oxygen. Kaltenbrunner reached the top of K2, Earth’s second-tallest mountain, at 6:18 p.m. (local time) Tuesday, August 23.

Kaltenbrunner, supported by grants from the National Geographic Society, was one of four climbers to reach the summit of K2. Other team members to summit were Maxut Zhumayev and Vassiliy Pivtsov of Kazakhstan and Darius Zaluski of Poland. Kaltenbrunner’s husband, Ralf Dujmovits of Germany, and photographer Tomas Heinrich of Argentina had turned back to base camp August 19, judging the threat of an avalanche too great. Heinrich is documenting the expedition for an upcoming article for National Geographic magazine.

The K2 achievement also was a milestone for Zhumayev and Pivtsov; the ascent of K2 fulfilled their dream of climbing all 14 of the 8,000-meter peaks without using extra oxygen.

“I can't believe how lucky we were to reach the summit together in this fantastic weather, despite the difficult conditions during the ascent,” Kaltenbrunner said. “I would like to thank everyone for their ‘mental support,’ which I could clearly feel and which literally carried me to the summit.”

In the days approaching the summit, the team waded through waist-deep snow and battled high winds, with avalanche conditions that for several days made the attempt at the summit look implausible.

According to alpine record-keeper Eberhard Jurgalski, before the achievement of Kaltenbrunner, Zhumayev and Pivtsov, only 24 people in the world had made it to the top of all 14 tallest mountains. This includes Dujmovits, who ascended K2 in 1994 and completed scaling the entire set of peaks two years ago. Only 10 of the 24 made the ascents without supplementary oxygen.

Kaltenbrunner and her team began the march to the K2 northern base camp from Xinjiang, China, on June 17. A group of camels ferried the team, their equipment and supplies to the Chinese base camp, about 3,900 meters high, crossing the wild Shaksgam Valley in the process. The team then ascended the peak via the North Pillar, a direct line to the summit, first climbed in 1982 by a Japanese team.

K2, located on the Pakistan-China border, is 8,611 meters (28,251 feet) high and part of the Karakoram Range. It has a reputation of being the hardest of the 8,000-meter-high mountains to climb, due chiefly to its steepness and the resulting technical-climbing challenges as well as unpredictable weather conditions. Since K2 was first summited by an Italian team in 1954, about 300 climbers have stood on top of the mountain, but many have perished trying. Kaltenbrunner’s attempt to summit K2 last year ended with the death of team member Fredrick Ericsson.

July 12, 2011

When to Go: Pre-monsoon (March or April) gives you the rhododendrons in bloom and lots of climber action, but post-monsoon (November) gives you drier weather. Go with guide services that use local Sherpa guides, cooks, and porters—it’s part of the experience.

Arguably the greatest of all high-mountain journeys, this stroll through Nepal’s Khumbu district lets you see three of the highest peaks on Earth (Everest, Lhotse, and Lhotse Sar) in one glance—and dozens more Himalayan giants along the way. A favorite is the view from Thyangboche, called by renowned mountain explorer W.H. Tillman the “greatest view in the world.” But it’s the deep immersion in the Sherpas’ Buddhist culture that will bring you back for the friendly villages, the monasteries, and the polyglot scene of world travelers who come for the high-octane pilgrimage to Everest.

Insider Tip: Go slow on the way up. Healthy hikers could cover 35 miles in two days, but the need to acclimatize means you’ll take ten days on the trek in to Everest, but only three on the trek out. The enforced downtime allows you to savor the experience—and the culture of people who live there.

June 06, 2011

Editor's Note: In May, Edurne Pasaban, our 2011 People's Choice Adventurer of the Year, returned to Everest in an attempt to climb it for the second time, this time without supplemental oxygen. If successful, she would have become the first woman to climb the 14 8,000-meter peaks without supplemental oxygen. Here she reports on the dramatic events at the end of her expedition.

Posted May 24, 2011

I don't know where to begin, or how to tell you about everything that has happened over the last few days. So many things, so many emotions, so much sadness, so much happiness, so much of everything. I find it very, very difficult to tell you about it, but I am going to try.

May 23, 2011

By Dave Hahn, a guide for RMI Expeditions and First Ascent; Photographs by Dave Hahn and Linden Mallory

More Everest: See more Everest photos, take our Everest quiz, or watch expedition videos.

Dispatch #14 - The Summit

Our hope was to make the summit bid short and sweet, not so much because going for the top of Mount Everest is an awful and onerous chore, but more because dragging it out can be. Besides, we believed we were shooting for a discreet patch of calm weather and forecasts for such a patch are generally only reliable a few days in advance. It was to our advantage to cover big chunks of the mountain in a relative hurry. Leaving base camp and relocating to ABC in one push was our first real test in this effort and that went quite well. Even so, we'd planned a full rest day at ABC in order to get recovered, rehydrated, and ready for the real test—all of the Lhotse Face in one shot—about a vertical mile which would take us to 26,000 feet.

May 17, 2011

Text and photo by Dave Hahn, a guide for RMI Expeditions and First Ascent. In May 2010 Hahn reached the summit of Mount Everest for the 12th time, the most of any a non-Sherpa climber. This time, he is leading a Bill McGahan and his 16-year-old daughter, Sara, on a bid for the summit. Follow the team's Everest expedition in dispatches here.

More Everest: See more Everest photos, take our Everest quiz, or watch expedition videos.

Dispatch #13

﻿Sara McGahan, Linden Mallory, and myself set out from base camp just after 5 a.m. on a final mission through the Khumbu Icefall. It was meant to be our summit bid. When we reached the first series of ladders over crevasses, we took a break. Linden and I were pleased that we'd reached this point relatively quickly, but it was clear that Sara's mind was not entirely on the day's climbing. She spoke up to say that she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to go through with the planned weeklong summit push. We suggested retreating to base camp in order to reassess, and Sara agreed that would be the best course of action.

May 12, 2011

Big things are happening in the Himalaya, where teams have begun summitting Everest and other peaks. The news, of course, was that Apa Sherpa has claimed his 21st summit of the mountain, topping out Wednesday morning at 9:15 a.m. local time. The successful climb extends his record for the person who has climbed the world's highest peak the most times. Apa, and the rest of his Eco-Everest team, will now start cleaning up the mountain, as they have for the past few years, bringing tons of garbage, left behind by other expeditions, down to be properly disposed of. The team also leads the crusade to inform the general public of the effects of climate change on Everest as well.

The Adventure Consultants put a few climbers on the summit as well, working hard to beat the crowds that are expected at the summit over the next few days. It seems that all the major commercial squads are now in place, to have a crack at the summit. Good weather is expected into the weekend.

Stay tuned for much more over the next few days. Congratulations to everyone who successfully reached the summit today. Well done. And good luck to everyone queuing up to have their shot tomorrow and Friday.

Chherring, Dawa Jamba, and Kaji made a significant contribution to our team's potential success today. They got up around 2 a.m., put on big packs at ABC, and climbed all the way to the South Col, establishing what will be our High Camp at 26,000 feet. All three were safely back down the Lhotse Face and into ABC by noon. They'll hope to repeat that extremely big morning of work in the next few days ... boosting enough tents, fuel, oxygen, and miscellaneous heavy stuff up to the Col so that the door will be open for our summit bid.

According to the story, Upadhyaya was making an acclimatization rotation on the mountain and had just climbed up to Camp 1. What exactly happened after he reached that point, which is located at roughly 6,096 meters (20,000 feet), remains unclear, and the cause of death hasn't been determined, but it seems likely that the rigors of the climb were a bit too much for his body to take.

In the original post I wrote about Upadhyaya's attempt I noted that he had almost no mountaineering experience, and while it is unclear if that had anything to do with his death, the lack of a climbing background certainly didn't help his cause.

Our condolences to Upadhyaya's friends and family, who probably feared that this could happen.

May 05, 2011

Text and photographs by Dave Hahn, a guide for RMI Expeditions and First Ascent. In May 2010 Hahn reached the summit of Mount Everest for the 12th time, the most of any a non-Sherpa climber. This time, he is leading a Bill McGahan and his 16-year-old daughter, Sara, on a bid for the summit. Follow the team's Everest expedition in dispatches here.

Must be rest day #1. Still decompressing from the last week on high and not yet laser-focused on the coming week, which will be higher still. I'm tempted to call the past week a good one, since we each came down healthy and with some clarity and confidence as to what will be next, but to be honest, it was a tough week in several ways.